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Restricted Pages And Validation/Optimization For SEs

Posted: Sun Nov 19, 2006 6:54 pm
by Superman859
I've been putting up some files that are in a members only section of the site.

At the beginning of the page, it requires a login check, which redirects them to the login page if they haven't logged in with a valid username/password.

My question is this - will search engines ever be able to 'touch' these pages? Since the engines robots wouldn't have the correct session, they will never 'see' the rest of the page. Would the pages need to be optimized at all for search engines?

I understand that the pages might not be spidered because of this and that is fine. The pages SHOULD be valid because I use a template that is valid in xhtml transitional (well, except for one background attribute that I dont really want to change), but I cannot check to see if they are valid once they are up or anything like that.

Anyways, I'm just looking for advice/opinions on how this restricted content comes into play with SEs. Validation is still necessary since it makes the pages standard.

Thanks.

Posted: Sun Nov 19, 2006 8:50 pm
by Christopher
There is no need to do SEO on inaccessable pages. If you need a password to get to the page then the search engines can't.